little boy blue
by cold clouds
Summary: Some people aspire to lose themselves in smoke and wind and daydreams. Annabeth chooses to do so in Percy Jackson. Is it possible to build something permanent between two temporary people? Mortal AU.


**~ Merry Christmas internet ~**

 ***Warning- mentions of drug abuse.** ** _*_**

 ***Disclaimer- Rick Riordan owns my soul and pjo.***

* * *

Little boy blue.

There were messed-up kids like me, and then there were messed-up kids like Percy Jackson.

The high kids, the troubled kids, the kids who had ash in their teeth. The kids who had to try hard to feel things.

People like me spend their lives trying to find who they truly are in order to make something real and permanent, and then some people aspire to lose themselves in smoke and wind and daydreams.

The only things about these kids that never change, I believe, is the way they kiss and the way they cry. And for that, I'm afraid, I have no explanation.

But I know from experience that it's the truth.

* * *

Annabeth Chase was five years old when she decided her favourite colour was blue.

Blue was the summer sea and the Californian sky and the blotchy ink her mother used to write letters with. Blue was in what she loved, in the things that would never leave her. It was the best colour.

Sadly, by the time Annabeth Chase was seven years old, blue was far away.

The sea by New York was swirling sludge, the sky was always heavy with clouds and neon lights, and mother's letters were all stashed in the bottom drawer of Mr. Chase's study. Mother was buried with her lids drawn sleepily shut, but Annabeth didn't have any trouble finding her eyes in the thunderclouds and the exhaust fumes coming from the big black car. Annabeth remembered holding forget-me-not flowers to be buried with her, but the blue seemed shallow and empty, bright and strange in the city. Grey was Annabeth's irises and father's tears and the dirtied snow on the pavements. It wasn't the best colour, but it was the most real to her.

Mrs. Chase was buried with white roses instead.

When Annabeth was nine, a new boy came to school. His name was Percy Jackson and his favourite colour was blue. He was shallow and strange and his eyes were bright as the lights in the city. He was stupid and lazy and laughed a lot. He always carried highlighters and permanent markers in his pockets as if he'd need to write something down at a moment's notice. Annabeth didn't know quite what to make of him.

The day Annabeth first talked to Percy Jackson was when they started middle school together.

He sat next to her on the bus, and he wasn't wearing a raincoat despite the downpour outside. He was all wet and flecked Annabeth with raindrops, but he had nice lips and straight, white teeth. They talked about the end of summer and doodled on each other's hands in Percy's blue permanent marker.

Without consulting eachother over it, they sat together on the bus every day after that.

When she was thirteen, Annabeth got her first tattoo. It was her mother's name inked in blue cursive on her left wrist.

Percy Jackson asked her why she got it, so she told him she wanted something permanent to remember her by. He said that ink wasn't really permanent, and neither were people, and she shouldn't try to make temporary things last forever. Annabeth Chase hated Percy Jackson, and told him that beside the lockers. However, she still took her usual seat beside him on the way back home.

Percy said when the time came, he wanted to be cremated so he could travel the world with the wind. Either that, he told her, or he'd try floating in the Atlantic until he couldn't anymore. That's what his father had done, he said. He felt warm and close, and when he cried he was silent, and his kisses on her forehead were cool and soft as the rain in April. He was so unsteady.

It was a slow ride for the two of them, but she still rested her head on his shoulder and let him stroke through her curls, because it distracted her from the sting behind her eyes.

One Christmastime a few years later, Annabeth both lost and attained Percy Jackson.

After one particularly cold winter term, he was decidedly hers to kiss amidst the light snow showers, and hers to bring home to the howling hearth, and hers to touch and love and caress under frozen cold streetlamps and between warm white sheets. He often took out his colourful markers to trace the veins in her wrists and hands, and she found herself counting his freckles to fall asleep.

But he was never entirely hers alone.

He was a slave to blue pills and pretty faces and nicotine. He liked staring at stars until they changed colour, and going onto balconies late at night to watch the smoke he breathed out dissipate into clouds. He was good at kissing and smiling and getting lost.

Annabeth devoted the time he didn't give her to crinkled brown pages and red coffee-stained sweaters. He was the frost to her fire, taking up the right half of her heart where deoxygenated blood flowed through. She sometimes tried painting him in watercolour. Sometimes his hands, his lips, and even his eyes before they became unfocused.

In her senior year of high school, Annabeth began to notice the rumours that flew about the halls: Percy Jackson was poisonous.

He was as painfully detached from society as he was striking, his presence subtle and startling as clouds suddenly swallowing the sun mid-summer. He still smiled a lot, and it was a very beautiful smile, but it never quite reached his wandering eyes. Yes he was quiet as ever, but in a very loud sort of way.

Annabeth was seventeen when she walked to school in a thunderstorm.

On the way she was joined by Percy Jackson, who still refused to wear raincoats. His aqua eyes looked brilliant in the rain, she decided, and his black lashes were long and spidery.

They spoke. They talked about how drowned Miss Zimmerman's hydrangeas were in her garden of assorted potted plants, and how wrong the weathermen had been yesterday with his predictions of 'light showers and sunny spells'. Everything was bright and shiny. Purple, silver, green, gold, blue. Annabeth suddenly liked a lot of colours. When she asked if he was going to prom, he told her he would be somewhere else. He always was.

First period that morning was Art. He didn't talk and he didn't listen, either. He got out a permanent marker and doodled at the edges of his canvas as if it wouldn't stain it forever. It was hard to tell if he even remembered her from that morning, since he acted as if they hadn't met at all. He really was watercolour, she realized. He'd been washed away with the rain.

She was twenty years old when Annabeth told herself she'd never look at Percy Jackson again.

She didn't ever really get to know him anyway. No one had. She knew he liked colourful pills and Alphaville songs and permanent markers. He liked the sea and the sky and writing in blue ink. He liked getting lost in the city and sleeping on trains, long walks in the rain and small-talk with strangers. Once when he was fifteen he'd kept his summer freckles all year long, and just to annoy him she tried to dot them all together in pen by his prominent collar-bone. He had scarcely noticed at all. Sometimes Annabeth could honestly believe someone had put him together in a dream. Had one person ever been less attainable? Less real?

She wanted something tangible, safe, secure, infinite. She wanted a person who could tattoo themselves onto her heart, not ghost their fingers over it before whispering goodbye. She was scared that soon enough Percy Jackson would disappear, and she'd have to do so with him.

Annabeth Chase decided she would rather be real than happy.

Back then, it was safe to guess that no one was sure what Percy Jackson planned to do. He was one of those people who liked to vanish from the world every so often. One day someone noticed he'd gone, and for once he stayed that way. Perhaps he'd given up on the city and decided to head for another town. Some said he'd died of a drug overdose the old-fashioned celebrity way. He may even have tried floating in the Atlantic until he couldn't any more. Either way, it was a quiet end for a quiet boy. His mother left the area and never spoke a word.

It had taken a long time for her, but when Annabeth Chase was thirty-five years old she decided that her favourite colour was blue.

Blue was the summer sea and the Californian sky and the permanent marker her old high-school sweetheart used to trace the veins on her hands with. Blue was in the second tatoo she'd had inked by her collarbone, which was a simple constellation where she'd joined up her own summer freckles. Blue was in what she loved, in the things that left her: the blood in the right half her heart and the tears on her cheek. She wasn't sure whether or not his ashes were scattered about the wind, or if the glow behind his eyes glittered on the ocean's surface, but wherever he was could only be vast and blue and beautiful.

 _You're far, far, far away, my dear_. _Please don't completely disappear._


End file.
